(15-20% of instructional time should be spent on prereading activities.)
Getting Ready to Read
As students approach a reading assignment, you can engage them with the text through quickwrites, group discussions, brainstorming, or other activities to achieve the following goals:
Help students make a connection between their own personal world and the world of the text.
Help students activate prior knowledge and experience related to the issues of the text.
Help students share knowledge and vocabulary relevant to the text.
Help students ask questions that anticipate what the text is about.
Surveying the Text
Surveying the text gives students an overview of what the essay is about and how it is put together. It helps students create a framework so they make predictions and form questions to guide their reading. Surveying involves the following tasks:
Looking for titles and subheadings.
Looking at the length of the reading.
Finding out about the author through library research or an Internet search and discussing the results with the class.
Discovering when and where this text was first published.
Noting the topics and main ideas.
Making Predictions and Asking Questions
Ask questions to help students make predictions about the text based on textual features noted in the survey process. Help them notice textual features that are relevant to this genre and this rhetorical situation. Ask them to think about the character and image of the writer, the nature of the audience, and the purpose of the writing. Be sure to ask students to explain how they formed their predictions, making them give evidence from the text that they surveyed. You could ask questions like the following:
What do you think this text is going to be about?
What do you think is the purpose of this text?
Who do you think is the intended audience for this piece? How do you know this?
Based on the title and other features of the text, what information/ideas might this essay present?
Anticipation Guide (or study guide)
An anticipation guide helps students navigate through the issues in the text. The best Anticipation Guides call upon the students to bring their experience to their reading and create a written tutorial for the selection.
Ask students to read the first few paragraphs of the text (depending on where the introduction ends) and the first sentence after each subheading or the first sentence of each paragraph if the text is short. Then ask your students to address the following questions:
What is the topic of the text?
What is the author’s opinion on that topic?
What do you think the writer wants us to do or believe? How did they come to this conclusion?
Turn the title into a question [or questions] to answer as you read the essay.
Introducing Key Vocabulary
Before students start reading the text, give them several key words to look for as they are reading. Choosing key words and then reinforcing them throughout the reading process is an important activity for students at all levels of proficiency. The following are options when introducing key vocabulary.
Provide the meanings of key words for the students.
Ask students to record the meanings of key words from the context of their reading in a vocabulary log.
Assign students to work in small groups to look up key vocabulary words.
Go through key words as a class project.
The information on this page is quoted directly from:
The California State University
Task Force on Expository Reading and Writing
EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE
Prereading
(15-20% of instructional time should be spent on prereading activities.)Getting Ready to Read
As students approach a reading assignment, you can engage them with the text through quickwrites, group discussions, brainstorming, or other activities to achieve the following goals:
Surveying the Text
Surveying the text gives students an overview of what the essay is about and how it is put together. It helps students create a framework so they make predictions and form questions to guide their reading. Surveying involves the following tasks:
Making Predictions and Asking Questions
Ask questions to help students make predictions about the text based on textual features noted in the survey process. Help them notice textual features that are relevant to this genre and this rhetorical situation. Ask them to think about the character and image of the writer, the nature of the audience, and the purpose of the writing. Be sure to ask students to explain how they formed their predictions, making them give evidence from the text that they surveyed. You could ask questions like the following:
Anticipation Guide (or study guide)
An anticipation guide helps students navigate through the issues in the text. The best Anticipation Guides call upon the students to bring their experience to their reading and create a written tutorial for the selection.
Ask students to read the first few paragraphs of the text (depending on where the introduction ends) and the first sentence after each subheading or the first sentence of each paragraph if the text is short. Then ask your students to address the following questions:
Introducing Key Vocabulary
Before students start reading the text, give them several key words to look for as they are reading. Choosing key words and then reinforcing them throughout the reading process is an important activity for students at all levels of proficiency. The following are options when introducing key vocabulary.
The information on this page is quoted directly from:
The California State University
Task Force on Expository Reading and Writing
EXPOSITORY READING AND WRITING COURSE